Lately In The Lankanosphere

Yes, it's back. It's been a long time since the last "lately" post in these parts, mostly because there just hasn't been much in the Lankan blogosphere that's caught my reading eye. Most of my regular reads have gone quiet or now prefer to splash out quick 140 character tweets or Facebook status updates, usually saying how much they hate Facebook's latest look, instead of sitting down and putting the effort in to write sntces + wrds tht arnt abbrvted.

Many of these former bloggers are so outrightly selfish that they concentrate on their own lives, never thinking about the enjoyment of us, their readers. And Kottu has morphed into more of an aggregator than it ever used to be. Say what you like about fixing the most read lists but there used to be a sense of interaction and community on Kottu that's no longer there. It's become like a band that have split up but get back together now and again to do a tour just for the money.

And then this week there was a shift in the Earth's vibrations, a sneeze in the Lankanosphere and my interest was captured.

First Java Jones whacked one out. Then he wrote a post. There are many blogging youngsters who are unaware of the legend that is Java Jones, of his widespread influence among many of us, not to mention that he's a cat only matched in coolness by TC. Or Huggy Bear, but he's not a cat. As a young up and coming blogger all those years ago I'd read Java's posts and wish I could write with his fluidity and sheer fucking sense of craziness. They tell me that copious amount of drug taking helps with this.

These days JJ has semi retired and spends most of his time living in the hill country. He blogs only occasionally and spends the majority of his time practicing the vuvuzela. He's one of only a handful of professional vuvuzela players in the world and is a first call session player for most of the world's top gigs. He'll deny it though, he's humble and bashful like that. You thought it was a saxaphone at the beginning of Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street didn't you? Well it's not, it's JJ, doing his vuvuzela thing.

His post is only a brief one, on his thoughts on the Wikileaks cable saga, but worth its weight in gold and it got my attention immediately. I urge you to check it out and comment demanding that he writes more.

Then Dramaqueen, usually as elusive as a huge big invisible and soundless monster who's decided to have a game of hide and seek, decided to spurt out not just one, but four posts, all in one day. Somewhere in there lurks a joke about four poster beds. I wish I was wittier, as you do probably. About me I mean, not about you. You probably think you're quite funny as it is.

The thing about DQ is that she's funny, in a slightly animal loving and sensitive way. I can imagine that an evening with her, involving drinking games and farting would be incredibly good fun, until the point that an innocent fellow cracked a joke about killing cats or breeding Christmas trees for commercial reasons. Then all hell would break loose and the farting would stop.

Grab yourself a few minutes and read her posts, my favourite is this one, the story of her first full body massage. (insert smutty joke here......) Any girl who can write about farting gets my vote every time.

DD also came out with a quickie. His blog isn't one I find easy on the eye, what with its various adverts blaring out at full volume all the time, but I'm always keen to read his perusings. The latest one is entitled the £600 haircut and it's about, well a £600 haircut. At first glance I saw the opening picture of him and assumed that he was showing us the "before the haircut" situation.

"Not a problem" I thought, a decent hairdresser should be able to tidy up that mess and do great things with it. I read on and, without giving too much away, I'll only say that I hope DD got a receipt!

Also catching the RD eye lately has been this new blog called I am. I've mentioned it before but it deserves another shout. It's an eye and earcatching combination of images and narrative, all about Sri Lanka's regional identities, told through the eyes of some highly thought provoking characters.

Dominic Sansoni himself told me the other day that it's much, much harder than it appears to put images and sound together and come up with something so special. I noticed that he was talking to his mouth was actually making the movements for the word before the one I was hearing. So it must be true then. Check it out and see for yourself.

Groundviews has gone to the shops and got itself a sexy new look for the festive season. I must admit that I can't figure out if the logo is new or if it's always been there, but I wonder if Sanjana, at the merest hint of a rights violation, rushes into a phone box, does a spin and emerges with a T shirt with the GV logo on, some extra fast slippers and his pants on the outside. Actually, as I think on it I realise that's how he was dressed last time I met him anyway. Presumably he must have been rushing to an emergency.

This post by Michael Meyler tells us Suddhas about the word "goday". I just wish I was able to pronounce it correctly without you guys looking puzzled and then laughing at me once you realise what I'm attempting to say. The esteemed Mr Meyler tells us that the nearest word to "goday" in contemporary English s the word "naff".

With the utmost respect to him I disagree. I reckon it's "chav" or "chavvy". Just ask the Auf, he'll back me on this. And talking of the Auf I've heard it on good authority that there may be a little bit of Auf love in the air. I won't tell you who's involved but let's just say that myself and Pseudorandom are currently busily writing our speeches.

The Indi.ca channel has been particularly busy of late. He points out in this post that the noughties is almost over. The fact had escaped me until I read it. Bloody hell, that's another decade gone. In my life it's fair to say that it was a pretty big one, how was it for you?

Rajaratarala, him with all the As, published this post, all about eggs, chickens and the possibility of them being imported for the festive season. Clearly it's a chicken egg situation. That's all I have to say on the matter.

That's pretty much it for now. If you want more you know where to look. It's ever so slightly awash with posts on how to make your blog look like a Christmas tree, film reviews or out of focus pictures taken on someone's mobile of Murali dancing at a party but, once you filter through all of that stuff, there are some gems to be found.

As they say in France, this isn't goodbye, just bonjour.

RD

The Election, The Blogs, The Book And The Twits

I was sitting at Heathrow airport yesterday, dropping C as she headed off to the motherland, chatting and watching the Lankans milling around waiting for the plane. One of the things we talked about was the Presidential election and our respective thoughts on it.

I've observed myself as I've observed things happening and I've been amazed and fascinated by the impact of the various internet mediums (if that's the term) and how they enabled me, and probably millions of others, to get real time information and feedback on the state of play in Sri Lanka on a minute by minute basis from all those thousands of miles away.

There were four main platforms I used, the obvious ones; Facebook, Twitter, the mainstream press (on the net) and the blogs, mostly fed to me from Kottu or the ones I link to from here.

In the days preceding the election the blogs and press were the clear winners in terms of getting across their message. For months each Sri Lankan newspaper had told us of the virtues and benefits of its chosen candidate, the majority had gone for MR but some still extolled the virtues of the retired General. In the run up each paper had time to produce nice wordy and well thought out articles, as well as a lot of rubbish.

There were also emails going around, the usual sort of "fan" thing, as well as people putting things up on Facebook, though usually copy and paste jobs or links to blogs.

The blogs did their thing too. There were people like Sittingnut and Voice In Colombo on one side, others on the opposing side and many who, to me at least, didn't really appear to be on the side of either of the main contenders, but on the side of change. By that I mean that there were people who weren't really pro SF but were going to vote for him because they'd had enough. Had I been a voter I would have bunged myself in that category.

Then, when we got to the 26th (election day) and the 27th (results day), the situation in terms of the coverage changed dramatically. The online newspapers, all except the Daily Mirror, though that's more like a forum these days anyhow, couldn't react quickly enough to act as "real time" information providers, so other platforms rose to the occasion, a word I always have trouble spelling.

Most bloggers, those that had kept their allegiance a bit quiet before at least, came out and showed their colours. There were some suprises. Indi's support for SF surprised me more than I could believe. With many of his posts seeming quite pro MR recently I'd thought that the incumbent prez had managed to seduce Indi somehow. How wrong I was.

On the 27th, as the results started to filter through and the Cinammon Lakeside got more publicity and TV footage than Yasmin Cader could ever dream of, it was Twitter that came into its own, with the blogs taking a firm second place. Facebook seemed to fade away and only acted as an outlet for people tell us that they'd written a blog post or that they had a gig the next weekend and we're all invited.

I was surprised that Facebook became a bit pedestrian in that sense but, with hindsight I probably shouldn't have been. After all it is a social networking site first and foremost. The chat thing was something I used, to talk to a few people to see what their take on this was, but that was more because it was there than anything else.

Twitter became like one of those old fashion newsroom machines, the ones that churn out all the news on ticker tape. Everyone was telling everyone what was going on, then everyone else was retweeting things in case we missed it the first time around. Tweets were coming through at a rate so fast that even Michael Schumacher a Sri Lankan bus driver would have struggled to keep pace with. It was mad but in a good way.

Those people who had a little more time somehow managed to dash off quick but informative blog posts giving better detail than possible on Twitter. Indi and Groundviews were particularly prolific in this sense and I genuinely thank them for the updates. In the middle of all of this the Daily Mirror site went down, I don't know if it was sheer volume of traffic or what, but it was as much use as a clown's outfit to a fish, one that doesn't want to work in a circus at all.

I came across some blogs that I've hardly ever read before, one of which was this Telshane one. As with all the information sources it was vital to try to apply one's own filtering mechanisms to things. People were forwarding rumours, heresay, Chinese as well as Taiwanese whispers and things they'd heard from their driver who had heard it from the cousin brother of his friend's sister.

As I read posts like this one I wondered first what they've done to the pool at the Cinnamon Lakeside, as it looks as though one end now has a sort of barrier. Secondly and rather more importantly I felt incredibly involved with the goings on. It was like an out of body experience. I was at my desk, in between meetings on a pretty busy day yet only seconds away from events as they unfolded.

So that's my take on things, or how things were revealed. It was a lesson to me, a very positive one about how the world is so small and accessible. It's not about journey times and physical distances, it's all about broadband speeds, Blackberries and HD video, Tweets and blogs.

The post of the day?

This one. It made me laugh.

Have a good weekend all.

RD

Three Wicked Things

They're different, but here are three random phrases that I've read in recent weeks that have stuck with me.

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity." - Charles Mingus.

"It's sort of like the fort railway station suddenly becoming an exclusive members only club." - Cerno

"You wouldn't know subtlety if it punched you in the face." - Someone on Twitter who I can't recall.

Words can be very beautiful, particularly if they're put in the right order.

Dear 16 - The Audit Trail

The Dear 16 year old me has been, it's fair to say, quite a success. Of course success is relative and I mean that it's been a success if one judges it by the volume of posts that have resulted and the general "interest" factor.

If you'll let me be honest with you I'll inform you that I feel quite the proud father about this. I mean to say, I sort of started it. And, while there's a small dose of honesty going around here I should share the fact that I so nearly lied to you in that original post. You see I was so close to pretending that the topic itself was my idea when the truth was that I'd seen it on Jonathan Ross' Twitter. I'm not sure on the apostrophe situation with the name "Ross" either.

My initial post tagged the Gypsy and DD, some wise choices I had thought. If one wants a tag to take off and spread like wildfire (the fires that are wild not the band, who are no longer I think) then these two bloggers appeared perfect. The Gypsy, though prone to strange hand movements, can always be relied upon to come out with an eloquent and elegant bit of wordcraft. We waited for a few days and then she did her stuff. Ever the rebel though, she went and tagged three people, that's a whole fifty per cent more than was allowed in the rules. The cheek of the girl!

DD responded and tagged the Blacker Bros, a risky and dangerous move. These ad people are generally too cool for school and it was always a gamble as to whether the bros Blacker would respond. I played a gig the other night to a room full of ad people and they stood there, arms crossed, with a look on their faces as if we'd just told them that they could do with dressing a bit more trendily when they go to work. Yes, they're a tough crowd.

But TKRP responded pretty quickly with this post and, some days later DB kicked out this beauty. It started a minor spat about the exact period in which DD and DB actually met as well, always a bonus. The bros done well.

About this time I thought I might try and do a chart of sorts, just to see how things had, and would progress. After some deliberation I settled on Word as the software of choice. For a bloke with my knowledge there wasn't a lot of deliberation to be done and Word was the only I have a passing knowledge of that might have done the job. I proceeded and drew lines, arrows and added in links and all sorts of things that I hadn't the slightest clue could be done.

The chart is rapidly becoming an indecipherable scrawl of blue and black ink, but I hope, if you decide to click and enlarge it, that you'll be able to follow the story so far. So far up until Friday morning that is. I'm at home and it's Sunday evening as I write this, you'll most likely be reading the post on Monday and the chart outlines the position as at Friday morning. If your first name is Dr and your surname is Who then you might just understand that last sentence.

My last foray into the Lankanosphere showed that there have been a few more people writing their Dear 16 post. I wonder if it will continue or if it will get too boring soon. Surely there must come a point at which we all get bored of hearing how we were all desperately trying to have sex at 16, how none of us actually had done and how much wiser we are at this age. It's interesting to observe that we all think we've learned loads between 16 and now, whatever now is, yet we talk as if we know it all now.

I wonder if I'll write a letter to the 43 year old me when I'm 70 and think that I knew nothing when I was 43. It's also a damn scary thought that the gap between 16 and now is that same as that between now and being 70, if my maths is correct of course.

Many of the Dear 16s have been poignant, touching and quite revealing. Dinidu's is one such example, though he had the audacity to tag me. If he'd been within striking distance I'd have attempted to give him a cuff round the ear. Instead I sent him a copy of the chart with a note saying that I started it. Sometimes these kids have to be told.

I'm still waiting for Hissyfits' one, pretty much guaranteed to be funnier than a jar full of Stephen Fry's Tweets on acid, and I've discovered a bunch of blogs that I had never read before, always a good thing.

I'll keep on trying to update the chart but I fear it won't be long before I drown in the scrawl, or at least need to go on to a second page, which could be way beyond me. In the meantime if anyone wants an emailed copy of it just ask, leave a comment or whatever and I'll chuck it across.

Happy Monday all.

Hello Again

I'm back at work after the last couple of days off. C has returned to Singapore and life carries on with its usual pace and excitement.

Over here in London the weather is stunning, in a Londonly stunning way. Blue skies, well the one, warm temperatures and al fresco eating are the orders of the day. I even had to close my sunroof yesterday as the sun on the top of my head was too intense. Yes, yes I know there's not much hair on top there okay.

This long distance relationship lark can be tiring at times and it's probably no worse than the morning after they leave. I won't get all angsty and emo on you though so you can relax there. We did make a very vague plan, not so much a plan I guess, more of a maybe plan, to meet up in Lanka next time. This grabs me and excites me for so many reasons that will be obvious to you. It might happen.

Tomorrow it's K's thirteenth birthday, something I find incredibly believable, which is rather incredible in itself. So many kids grow too quickly and you find yourself, as I did last month with A, saying that you can't believe they're whatever age they happen to be. Well in the case of K I'm a bit stunned that she's only thirteen, it feels as if she's been there for a couple of years at least.

And then there's another gig on Saturday night, which I reckon will be a blast. The band's coming together as a unit and we're starting to feel really tight. Another lovely summer's evening here on a Saturday night with fun people will put an even bigger smile on everyone's face.

It's funny how quickly things change isn't it? It's fascinating how yesterday's changes become today's normal.

I got back from dropping C at the airport last night and strolled out of the pad to get some food and have a quick drink in my local pub. Well the pub was closed down. It was only recently that I sat there and wrote a post in it and about it, all the while wondering how it survived. It didn't, the new management might do a more successful job of it but only time will tell.

Then, as I ambled casually down the road I passed a woman chatting quite loudly on a mobile phone in Sinhala. I was so captivated by it that I pretended to look in the window of the hi fi shop nexst to her. Of course I didn't understand a word of what she was saying, but knew that it was Sinhala. It's not that I'm unused to hearing the language, something about her in that street captured me and I stood there for a few seconds listening to her conversation and comprehending nothing.

She was very probably telling the other party that there was a pervert listening to her while pretending to look in the window of a hi fi shop. I hope she doesn't happen to read this blog, that could be awkward.

And what else is there to tell you?

I've got about ten posts to start, complete, delete or publish. Taking a break of sorts means that things store up, often to be forgotten completely or fester and grow into something fruity. And talking of fruity there are two things that I'm wondering if I should blog about. They're only about me, nothing lifechanging or hugely important in the worldly scheme of things, but I am contemplating whether to share or keep private.

If only I could ask you what you thought, but I'd have to tell you the things first. There's a flaw in that plan that even a British MP's accountant would spot at a hundred yards. Probably.

The Twitter journey continues with some trepidation. There are only about seventeen followers and little signs of things increasing. I'm wondering if it's not done by people of my age or if it just takes time to build up. The problem for me is that I struggle to write these short phrases about my life and make them sound interesting.

It's all well and good for Obama to write about the condensation on his window but, when I do it, it's hardly going to get much interest. On the positive side I only need about 500000 more followers to be near to Stephen Fry's level of popularity. That can't be too hard.

That's all for now, a real pimped up diary post if ever I wrote one.

More of the usual will follow. I hope you missed me, I think you didn't!

Must dash as there are about a million blog posts to read and catch up on.

RD

RD Is A Poof

After that last but one post I thought I'd have a look at this Twitter thing.

Well, you know how it is, how these things happen, don't you?

I only intended to look around and see what all the fuss is about but sometimes a chap can't help it. There I was, reading about Dinidu's Aunt or someone and, before I could say Britney I'd chosen a user name and created myself an account.

It's brought me closer to Stephen Fry, which is a good thing. In only a day I've become a Twitter convert, hopefully not in a manner that will stop me writing blog posts. I mean hopefully from my point of view, not necessarily your one.

I'm thinking about who I should follow apart from friends and family now.

A, the daughter, has reacted predictably pissedoffishly to me following her. It seems that it's fine for her to be followed by Yoko Ono but not so fine for her Dad to do the same.

A, C, K and me were talking about it last night and I was amazed, as I often am, by something said by K. She casually told us that she's set up a Twitter account but doesn't use it yet. She did it "just in case" Twitter got really popular, so that she'd be ready for the revolution, so to speak.

It's under my real name too. No biggie but it's a possible closing of circle thing. You more than likely know the name, feel free to follow if you desire. I can't promise anything spectacular, no onslaught of witty little snippets of messages or anything, but it's there if you want.

The weather's nice, the day is beginning and things look sunny all around.

Ooops, sorry, wrong medium.

So I'm a poof, according to DB.

Ha.